Fireworks seem to go off pretty much continually between Halloween and the weekend-after-Bonfire-night these days. I don’t object, and I rather like pumpkins and zombie costumes. Cats, witches and skeletons too. Though I’m not sure what nightmares were being channelled by the small child who came trick-or-treating to our door dressed as a ladybird.

And then Bonfire Night on Wednesday. None of this weird American Halloween stuff, just the fine old British tradition of burning a religious terrorist in effigy.

Actually we didn’t have a Guy, or masks, but we did have fireworks and a small bonfire in the yard. Plus the first mulled wine of the year, or glühwein, as we got used to calling it when we lived in Hamburg. Mit schuss, or schuß, of course (shot of rum in the bottom of the cup).

The cup I like to drink glühwein from is one that we bought in Hamburg, a white one with some kind of dishwasher-safe felt insultation on the sides (see the picture above). Looking at it as I helped myself, I saw two familiar chips out of the rim where, several years ago when the cup was quite new, I dropped it on the floor.

That was a peculiar accident that I remember vividly. I dropped the empty cup on a hard wooden floor, and it bounced. It was intact but the impact had made it oscillate wildly. As it bounced up toward me, the rim was deforming very rapidly in a mode curiously reminiscent of this illustration of a gravitational wave:

An animation of the effect of a (plus-polarized) gravitational wave on a ring of test particles. MOBle/Wikipedia

It was a lot faster though, there was clearly an enormous amount of energy in the vibration and I had a very urgent sense that the moment the cup even touched anything hard, such as the wall or floor, it would shatter violently.

I caught it. It stung, and at the extreme of the oscillating elipses, two diametrically opposite pieces of porcelain shot off with a “ping” as the energy dissipated in my hands. Hence the chips. But the cup (and my hands) survived.

This now sort of locked in my mind. Whenever I drink mulled wine from my favourite cup, I remember that incident and also, now, I think about gravitational waves. In addition, it is a fair bet that if and when Advanced LIGO or one of its successors finally observes gravitational waves from some huge collapsing binary star or something, as predicted by Einstein’s General Relativity, I’ll think about glühwein.

Such is life, and physics.

Jon Butterworth has written a book about being involved in the discovery of the Higgs boson, Smashing Physics, available here . Some interesting events where you might be able to hear him talk about it etc are listed here. Also, Twitter.